Politics Is Not About Being “Deserving”

There comes a time, every four years or so, when I do the unthinkable: I actually wish I were an American citizen. I wish I were an American so that I could vote in the U.S. presidential elections. After all, the United States is still arguably the most powerful country in the world, and much of the rest of the planet is watching with an incredulity now turning into grave concern as we grapple with the very real possibility that come November, Americans (in their anger and arrogance) will elect the most under-qualified, uneducated, and dangerous candidate either party has ever fielded (there may possibly have been more hateful presidential candidates or leaders in the past but those guys didn’t have access to nuclear weapons).

I speak, of course, of Donald Trump: reality-TV star, real estate tycoon, absentee father, fear mongerer, braggard, and, inconceivably, Republican presidential nominee. He can barely string a thought together (leading to suspicions he may actually be mentally unwell), and has never served in the military or demonstrably cared about Christian values, the working poor, or the lower middle class prior to deciding he wanted to be president, but somehow he has become the champion of the disenfranchised white Christian, those Americans who feel the “good old days” have slipped away from them (due, somehow, to non-Christians and non-white people) and that they need Trump to “make America great again”.

This year’s Democratic candidate is arguably one of the most qualified candidates ever to run–Hillary Clinton has been both a U.S. Senator and a Secretary of State (in addition to being a lawyer and sitting on several corporate boards). Prior to her own political career she was heavily involved in husband Bill’s presidency as an active First Lady (too active, many felt). She has lived with the job of leading the United States, both in a professional and personal capacity, for years. She knows first-hand how hard it is, how much is at stake. Granted, she is not perfect–she is a spinner of half-truths and a deep-pocketed friend of Wall Street as much as any other high-ranking politician, but if Hillary Clinton were to become the President of the United States she would not blame any one race or religion for America’s problems, she would not close its borders to trade (as Trump suggests he would do despite the fact that his own brand manufacturers its products outside the U.S.), and she can be trusted not to use, or threaten to use, the United States’ nuclear forces cavalierly. And if she loses, she can be trusted not to suggest that violent or deadly action be taken against Trump, as Trump has suggested about her.

And yet. People just don’t think Hillary deserves to be president. Sure, she’s really qualified and sure, she graduated from Yale Law School and sure, she’s dedicated most of her life to public service (albeit much of it while making a shit-ton of money with her husband on the side), and sure, it’s about time the U.S. had a female president, and sure, Donald Trump would most likely blow up the entire earth because someone insulted the size of his hands or his genitals. But people just don’t like her, okay? They just don’t like her and they don’t want to reward her ambitions by letting her be president because she just doesn’t deserve it, okay? (Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face).

Here’s the thing: OF COURSE Hillary Clinton does not deserve to be president. There is not one single human being on this earth who is deserving of the incredible and deadly amount of power that the President of the United States wields: power to create or destroy, to better this world or to decimate it. No one could ever be so intelligent, so prescient, so impartial, so ethical, and so morally perfect as to actually deserve this job–and anyone who was would never want it.

Which means that American voters, like most voters in modern democracies, must choose their leader based not on who deserves the job, because that is impossible, but on who would be best at it. And right now that person, for all her unlikable qualities, for all her machinations and manipulations and mistakes, is Hillary Clinton. There is no viable “third candidate”.

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